Fair Opportunity and Responsibility lies at the intersection of moral psychology and criminal jurisprudence and analyzes responsibility and its relations to desert, culpability, excuse, blame, and punishment. It links responsibility with the reactive attitudes but makes the justification of the reactive attitudes depend on a prior and independent conception of responsibility. Responsibility and excuse are inversely related; an agent is responsible for misconduct if and only if it is not excused. As a result, we can study responsibility by understanding excuses. We excuse misconduct when an agent's capacities or opportunities are significantly impaired, because these capacities and opportunities are essential if agents are to have a fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing. This conception of excuse tells us that responsibility itself consists in agents having suitable cognitive and volitional capacities - normative competence - and a fair opportunity to exercise these capacities free from undue interference - situational control. Because our reactive attitudes and practices presuppose the fair opportunity conception of responsibility, this supports a predominantly retributive conception of blame and punishment that treats culpable wrongdoing as the desert basis of blame and punishment. We can then apply the fair opportunity framework to assessing responsibility and excuse in circumstances of structural injustice, situational influences in ordinary circumstances and in wartime, insanity and psychopathy, immaturity, addiction, and crimes of passion. Though fair opportunity has important implications for each issue, treating them together allows us to explore common themes and appreciate the need to take partial responsibility and excuse seriously in our practices of blame and punishment.

Fair Opportunity and Responsibility lies at the intersection of moral psychology and criminal jurisprudence and analyzes responsibility and its relations to desert, culpability, excuse, blame, and punishment. It links responsibility with the reactive attitudes but makes the justification of the reactive attitudes depend on a prior and independent conception of responsibility. Responsibility and excuse are inversely related; an agent is responsible for misconduct if and only if it is not excused. As a result, we can study responsibility by understanding excuses. We excuse misconduct when an agent's capacities or opportunities are significantly impaired, because these capacities and opportunities are essential if agents are to have a fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing. This conception of excuse tells us that responsibility itself consists in agents having suitable cognitive and volitional capacities - normative competence - and a fair opportunity to exercise these capacities free from undue interference - situational control. Because our reactive attitudes and practices presuppose the fair opportunity conception of responsibility, this supports a predominantly retributive conception of blame and punishment that treats culpable wrongdoing as the desert basis of blame and punishment. We can then apply the fair opportunity framework to assessing responsibility and excuse in circumstances of structural injustice, situational influences in ordinary circumstances and in wartime, insanity and psychopathy, immaturity, addiction, and crimes of passion. Though fair opportunity has important implications for each issue, treating them together allows us to explore common themes and appreciate the need to take partial responsibility and excuse seriously in our practices of blame and punishment.

A new analysis of John Rawls's theory of distributive justice, focusing on the ways his ideas have both influenced and been misinterpreted by the current egalitarian literature.

This classic collection of essays, first published in 1968, has had an enduring impact on academic and public debates about criminal responsibility and criminal punishment. Forty years on, its arguments are as powerful as ever. H.L.A. Hart offers an alternative to retributive thinking about criminal punishment that nevertheless preserves the central distinction between guilt and innocence. He also provides an account of criminal responsibility that links the distinction between guilt and innocence closely to the ideal of the rule of law, and thereby attempts to by-pass unnerving debates about free will and determinism. Always engaged with live issues of law and public policy, Hart makes difficult philosophical puzzles accessible and immediate to a wide range of readers. For this new edition, otherwise a reproduction of the original, John Gardner adds an introduction engaging critically with Hart's arguments, and explaining the continuing importance of Hart's ideas in spite of the intervening revival of retributive thinking in both academic and policy circles. Unavailable for ten years, the new edition of Punishment and Responsibility makes available again the central text in the field for a new generation of academics, students and professionals engaged in criminal justice and penal policy.

Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility is a series of volumes presenting outstanding new work on a set of connected themes, investigating such questions as: · What does it mean to be an agent? · What is the nature of moral responsibility? Of criminal responsibility? What is the relation between moral and criminal responsibility (if any)? · What is the relation between responsibility and the metaphysical issues of determinism and free will? · What do various psychological disorders tell us about agency and responsibility? · How do moral agents develop? How does this developmental story bear on questions about the nature of moral judgment and responsibility? · What do the results from neuroscience imply (if anything) for our questions about agency and responsibility? OSAR thus straddles the areas of moral philosophy and philosophy of action, but also draws from a diverse range of cross-disciplinary sources, including moral psychology, psychology proper (including experimental and developmental), philosophy of psychology, philosophy of law, legal theory, metaphysics, neuroscience, neuroethics, political philosophy, and more. It is unified by its focus on who we are as deliberators and (inter)actors, embodied practical agents negotiating (sometimes unsuccessfully) a world of moral and legal norms.

autonomy principally in tenns of the agent's conscious choice of ends or conduct. From this, the cognitivist emphasis on mental states and their contents naturally follows. The presence of specified mental states, as signifying agent choice, thus becomes the hallmark of responsible conduct. Capacities model theorists, by contrast, interpret personal autonomy and agent responsibility in tenns of the looser notion of 'control'. From this perspective, conscious choosing is but one (highly responsible) instance of such control, and the presence or absence of mental states is primarily relevant to detennining degrees of responsibility. The examination of these two models occupies the bulk of this manuscript. Exploration of the capacities model and criticism of the orthodox view also generate treatment of legal issues such as the use of negligence liability, the nature of criminal omissions, the character of various legal defenses, and so on. Chapters 2 and 3 set out some of the thematic arguments outlined above and introduce tenninology and useful distinctions. Chapters 4 through 7 provide substantive analyses of agent responsibility and of standards of criminal liability. In these chapters, I argue for the comparative superiority of the capacities model of responsibility and offer recommendations for changes in current legal conceptions and standards of liability. Each chapter centers on an element of individual responsibility and related legal concerns. The final chapter, Chapter 8, comprises an overview of the integrated theory of responsibility and liability and its comparison with the traditional view.

A less-expensive grayscale paperback version is available. Search for ISBN 9781680923018. Business Law I Essentials is a brief introductory textbook designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of courses on Business Law or the Legal Environment of Business. The concepts are presented in a streamlined manner, and cover the key concepts necessary to establish a strong foundation in the subject. The textbook follows a traditional approach to the study of business law. Each chapter contains learning objectives, explanatory narrative and concepts, references for further reading, and end-of-chapter questions. Business Law I Essentials may need to be supplemented with additional content, cases, or related materials, and is offered as a foundational resource that focuses on the baseline concepts, issues, and approaches.

Most societies claim they support equal opportunity. But what does equal opportunity mean in practice? Beckley offers a substantive principle, disposition, and set of practices around genuine equality that rescues us from vacuous political cliches. He provides a robust understanding of equality of opportunity to better approximate justice for all.

Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility is a series of volumes presenting outstanding new work on a set of connected themes in moral philosophy and philosophy of action. This special volume in the series presents ten new papers marking the fiftieth anniversary of P. F. Strawson's landmark essay, "Freedom and Resentment." Some of the papers offer critical interpretation of Strawson's essay, some expand on his insights into the nature of interpersonal relationships, and some develop his overall themes in new and challenging directions.